>> oliver wendell holmes jr. served in the union army from 1861 to 1864 and he was wounded three times in battle. next, a panel of scholars look at the impact of the civil war on the life of the future supreme court justice, including how his time as a soldier affected his career. the supreme court historical society hosted this event. >> welcome to the supreme court. it is great to see so many people here for the supreme court historical society's second lecture of the 2014 government lecture series. the society was formed in 1974 by chief justice warren burger with the notion of promoting public understanding of the history of the court. it does that in many ways through lectures like these, through the publication three times a year of the journal of supreme court history, and through the acquisition of portraits of the justices for display in the building.

i would like to specially thank the society for its efforts to assist my predecessor and the curator's office of obtaining the portraits of all 19 of the prior courts which have now been obtained. on behalf of all the officers of the court here, i would like to thank the society for the all the efforts they give to all of us. we are joined by three distinguished scholars for discussion of the civil war and its impact on justice oliver wendell holmes. the moderator of the program will be professor brad snyder. he is an assistant professor of law at the university of wisconsin law school. he is the author of "well-paid slave." he is currently at work on the society of truth and other progressives that lived in the dupont circle rowhouse and

formed a political salon in the 1910's. he has written extensive articles about justice holmes. tonight's analysts are james mcpherson and g. edward white. james mcpherson is the george henry davis professor emeritus of united states history at princeton university. he is a noted and award-winning civil war historian. his book was awarded the indisputable award in 1965 and his book received the pulitzer prize in 1988. he has twice received the lincoln prize. the first time in 1998 and again in 2009. professor white is the david and mary hairston distinguished professor of law at the virginia law school.

he is the author of 16 books, including "law and american history volume one from the colonial years to the civil war." he served for chief justice warren. we will have more time for discussion about justice holmes. professor snyder, i turn the floor to you. >> i am delighted to have these historians here and i will try to get out of the way and let them be the stars of the show. oliver wendell holmes is a fascination to lawyers and historians both on the stories of the civil war and court. part of that was the huge impact of the civil war on his jurisprudence, on his life, on

his worldview. we are going to have professor mcpherson speak about the war and have professor white speak about him and court. the floor is yours. [applause] >> good evening, everybody. i am looking forward to this discussion. everybody who knows something about oliver wendell holmes jr. is familiar with the famous passage from his memorial day speech in new hampshire in 1884. through our great fortune, he said in the occasion, our hearts were touched with fire. it was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. we have seen with our own eyes the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, it is for us

to bear the reports to those who come after us. the fire that touched his heart was of course his service in the civil war two decades before he delivered the speech. in 1861, he was commissioned as first lieutenant at the 20th volunteer infantry. he rose to captain in his regiment, one of the best in the army of the potomac and one that suffered the fourth highest number of combat deaths in the entire army. he twice came close to being numbered among those dead. from serious wounds he received at the battle in october 1861, and antietam in september 1862. his third wound, these of shrapnel in his heel let the battle of 1863, appeared less

serious at first but required the longest period before he could return to his regiment in march 1864. he had transferred to staff duty with general wright. a safer post than an infantry regiment but one that proved more exhausting and dangerous than he anticipated. on one occasion, he was almost captured. at the end of his three years, he mustered out in july 1864 and enrolled at harvard law school. holmes' youth was certainly touched with fire. his experience in the ward did indeed teach him that life was a profound and passionate thing that could come to an end at any moment. as it happened, however, he

lived another 72 years after the third of the civil war wounds. during those 72 years, he alluded to his war experiences on several occasions on conversations with friends, but rarely in public. in fact, his memorial address in 1884 was his first public reference to the war since shortly after he had been mustered out 20 years earlier. thousands of books appeared about the civil war during his lifetime, but he read almost none of them. he did not join any of the veterans organizations like the grand army of the republic or the loyal legion of the united states or the 20th massachusetts veterans organization. he did not attend any of the many reunions of soldiers that took place during the postwar decades. he showed little passion or

activism toward the issues of nationalism and freedom that motivated his enlistment in 1861. during his time as a student at harvard college in 1857 to 1861, he had been an abolitionist. he was a distant cousin of wendell phillips. his best friend in college was norwood hollowell, an abolitionist from a philadelphia quaker family. he and hallowell formed as a bodyguard for phillips in the winter of 1861. they enlisted together in the 20th massachusetts after graduating from harvard. when hollowell's anti-slavery convictions trumped his quaker

pacifism. in february 1863, hollowell accepted the commission of lieutenant colonel in the new 54th massachusetts infantry, the first black regiment officially organized in the north. he tried to persuade holmes to take commission as a major in the regiment for together they could help advance the cause of abolition and equal rights. holmes was not interested. hollowell went on to fight in the 54th to command another holmes and hollowell drifted apart over the years. holmes' circle of close friends included few civil war veterans.

if his heart was touched with fire in the early 1860's, the fire appeared to have flickered and gone out in later years. or maybe not. perhaps the flame of commitment to a cause with a capital "c" had been transmitted into week amount of values described as such words as duty, honor, professionalism. holmes hinted at such a transformation in his next public reference to the civil war 11 years after his memorial day address when he spoke about the soldiers fate at the ceremony of harvard to award him an honorary degree in 1895. i do not know what he said.

i do not know the meaning of the universe. in the midst of doubt and the collapse of creeds, there was one thing i do not doubt. that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to blindly accept the duty in a cause he little understands, and a plan of campaign he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use. the point is not whether he was right about the soldiers lack of understanding. i think that most civil war soldiers did understand the cause for which they fought and had some understanding the strategy and tactics. the point is that holmes now admired the soldiers fate not in an ideological cause, but in

duty and honor. by 1863, midway through his civil war service, holmes' closest friend in the army was no longer hollowell, but henry abbott. abbott's ideological convictions were 180 degrees contrary to those of hallowell and, initially, to those of holmes. abbott was a democrat. almost a copperhead who was contemptuous to abolitionists, blacks, republicans, and abraham lincoln. yet, holmes struck up a friendship with him that turned into admiration for his extraordinary courage and cool professionalism under fire. abbott was a superb soldier, the best one in an outstanding regiment whose death profoundly

affected holmes. the example of abbott convinced holmes nobility of character consists of doing one job with consistent to end. or to return to his own words -- the highest value is that which leaves a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to blindly accepted duty. it is beyond my competence to evaluate his traditional philosophy or to trace any direct relationship with his civil war experience and his decisions as a justice on the

massachusetts and then the united states supreme court. i think i can see a connection between the evolution of his mindset as a soldier from idealism to pragmatism, the connection between that and the famous sentence, first sentence, in his book. the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience. many of the decisions reflected this pragmatism. reflected a willingness to allow state legislators or congress to experiment with legislation that might or might not accomplish his purpose but should not be declared unconstitutional just because it may of violated some principal or precedent. he cannot be categorized or as a liberal or conservative. he did not believe in the effort

to see many reform efforts by many progressives but he did believe in allowing them to make the effort. he was skeptical of some aspects of the new deal, but convinced of the necessity to do something. when president franklin d. roosevelt spoke with holmes four days after his inauguration, roosevelt asked him if he had any advice for dealing with the crisis facing the country. you were in a war, mr. president, holmes replied. i was in a war, too. in a war, there is only one rule -- form your battalions and fight. [applause] >> it is nice for me to be here

as well. i think james mcpherson had an excellent summary of his civil war experiences and i will not repeat that. i do want to suggest that the cumulative experience of the war for holmes with considerable ambivalence. first of all, he mustered out when his initial term of enlistment expired and he did that after a considerable soul-searching. months before he made the decision, he had written a letter to charles eliot norton talking about how he had been inspired by an account norton

had given out to the crusaders. he likened the participation in the war to a crusade on the poor of the world and then ended the letter by saying he planned to re-up. at the time he wrote the letter, he was to face the last of a series of harrowing experiences. the chancellorsville and wilderness campaigns where, as he put it, one time, the bodies the chancellorsville and of men laid six feet deep piled up in corpses as he rode his horse on a walk as he put it through the blue line. finally, he comes to the realization that he just can't go back because, among other

things, if he does go back, he is not going to be able to go back as an aid in a position that kept him out of the line of fire but back into his infantry unit. as he says to his mother, the i'm waiving promotion and not going to reenlist. the sufficient reason is i can no longer endure the horrors. he said, i know i can face it cooly when it is my duty, but war demoralizes me as it would any nervous man. so, he left with a fair amount of guilt. his comrades and friends had

died. he had survived and he had left before the war ended. i think one of the reasons that he does not participate in any of the ceremonies, any of the veterans and ceremonies, any of the occasions, making a formal remembrance of the war, is that feeling of ambivalence. and i also think that is the source of a lament his eyes -- a romanticization that he lends it to his reminiscences of the war where he remembers that this was a crusade where he remembers this splendid carelessness this soldier had

him throwing his life away for a cause he did not necessarily understand. at the same time, there is a good deal of private pride that he takes in having been in the war. in his late years, after the first decade of his service, he realizes he can do the work in a comparatively short time yet as a collegial body, he has to wait for his colleagues to catch up with them. holmes would hold the court on saturdays during his tenure. of the assignments for opinions would be dealt out after the conference on saturday. holmes would take is a simon home and produce an opinion approximately by tuesday. he would then ask the chief justice if he could do another one.

you would volunteer to do opinions that other justices were struggling with. chief justices had to rein him in because of these tendencies. not being able to do the full of not of work he desired, he turned to writing, correspondence, and in this correspondence with some of his intimate friends, he would note his war wounds. when he died of and the content of his house were surveyed, two items turned up. one of them was in a bedside table and it was a little, tiny case containing two bullets. there was a little memorandum

next to the bullets saying these are bullets which were taken from me in the civil war. in the closet of his bedroom were two uniforms. and, two of the uniforms were pinned -- these are the uniforms i wore during the civil war and this is my blood on them. it was a kind of secret pride in participating, but there is also an awkward memory which i think explains why he tends to emphasize in his accounts of the civil war this soldierly feeling. his admiration for abbott is on the other side of himself.

he recognizes in the war that one of the things he learned was just because he was perhaps more educated than some people and possibly more intelligent, he was not necessarily a better soldier. indeed, he was a deficient soldier. i think it is hazardous to draw much about his judicial career from these experiences. i think these were very important experiences in his life. to be sure, for much of his life as a judge, he had another life which was extrajudicial which involved correspondence and flirtation with women and a romance and an affectionate relationship with his law clerks.

but, i loathe to suggest there was much connection of a direct time between his jurisprudence and the civil war experiences. when holmes left the army of the potomac in july 1864, he was 23 years old. in the next 18 years, he would go to law school, be accepted to the massachusetts bar, begin with a law firm, edit the 12th edition of the commentaries, and write a series of articles and the american log review between the early 1870's and 1880's on a variety of subjects.

write the lectures he delivered that became common law. be appointed to the harvard and stay there for one year. leaving so suddenly that the harvard law colleagues and faculty, including james bradley thayer that raised money for a chair for him to take when he joined the faculty. he consulted none of them. they were thunderstruck and outraged. and took over 15 years before harvard granted holmes any official recognition even though by that time he went on to become an associate judge and chief judge of the supreme judicial court of massachusetts.

there was a lot going on in those 18 years between the time he leaves the army and the time he first stepped onto the bench. it is all law. it is a sampling of every professional role the legal profession presents. an immersion in it that was so extensive that on one occasion holmes was dining with a family any brought with him to the dinner table one these greenback containing a manuscript that students used to use at the time. he is not a student at this point, he is practicing law. he is editing the commentaries and he has in the bag, the manuscript of his editor.

henry william james's mother says do you bring that back with you to the table all the time? he says, yes, i do. she then describes him as a powerful carved to narrow out a self beneficial -- his friends and colleagues note his intensity. this is not a trivial pursuit that he is engaging in. the law is very important for him. he struggles with understanding of how to do it as a law student and he finally concluded it is worthy of an intelligent man. so he throws himself into it. i think what professor james

mcpherson described as his pragmatism, i would find it hard to trace that to the civil war experience. with respect to his abolitionism, there was a considerable transformation of his attitudes while he is in service. he says later on his heroes in the war were more on the confederate side. he admired their courage and he admired their soldierly abilities. when he turns down hollowell's offer to join a regimen that would be composed of african-american soldiers, he tells this to henry abbott.

abbott writes in a letter saying, i am glad you didn't worship at the shrine of the great -- his record on civil rights issues as a supreme court justice is not exemplary. he is probably in an era in which the courts support for civil rights was grudging at best. holmes is even less grudging than his colleagues. so if there was an initial enthusiasm for abolitionism, it dissipated in the war. i think the greatest impact of the war on his work as a judge and scholar comes in this double

transformation that he made from the idea of the war being crusade to admiration of the soldier's fate. and then it takes yet another turn. when holmes begins to do holarship and be a judge, he liken intellectual enterprise to something like a solitary hazardous journey. he begins to wrap himself in a cult which is later called a jobism, the idea that you do your job the best you can and leave it at that. there is a remarkable passage in an address that holmes makes on the 50th anniversary of the

harvard class of 1861 -- 1911, in which he ays to an audience /incidentally, something like 70% of that class fought in the war. he is talking about the class and the war. he says, i learned in the regiment and the class to hammer out as solid and compact a piece of work as one could to try to make it first rate and to leave it unadvertised. hat is a good encapsulation of holmes's attitude towards his academic work. but did he learn it in the class or the regiment? i think not. or put it another way, i think only in transformation. thank you.

>> ok, so my job here is really just to get this discussion going and keep us from going over 7:00 because i've been instructed by the powers that be. what i am interested in is holmes as as a justice was considered a philosophy king and people had a field day with his ifferent philosophies. during the war he made a transition from abolitionism to something else i think there is a disagreement about what that something else is. professor mcpherson said pragmatism. louis would say skepticism of all ideas. professor white was resisting the idea towards the end that it was jobism, that was sort of

constructed later on, that that's not really what the war taught him at all. in his book, professor white says it was an unadvertised professional craftsmanship was what the war taught him. are these competing narratives about holmes' worldview and philosophy? are they contradictory? are they mutually exclusive? what narrative do we most know about how the war affected his thinking? >> i see no inconsistency between the idea of holmes as a pragmatist and holmes as a jobbist. what he admired more than anything else was a kind of professionalism of doing the job right, getting things right.

not exactly perfectionism, but whatever works and that seems to me the essence of ragmatism. one of his friends during much of his life was william james, who was the architecture of the philosophy of pragmatism. i think this admiration of abbott, the professionalism of abbott, the courage, the devotion to duty and to honor, really replaced the idea of devotion to a cause. war use of holmes's civil experience i think evolves into pragmatism but i don't see that consistent with what professor white described either. >> i think we are talking about related but different things.

i entirely agree that the cult of jobism is a translation of the either of soldiering. -- ethos of soldiering. i think that holmes gets it from that but he does not explicitly acknowledge the connection. but he feels he's trying to do his job the best way he could in the same manner that abbott was trying to do his job the best way he could. but pragmatism. scholars have been tempted to describe holmes as a pragmatist. i think first that they would have to get over a letter that he wrote to william james when james published a book on pragmatism. william james and holmes had been close in the 1860's. and these are the days in which they were both participants in the metaphysical club. james went abroad to study medicine and came back.

he and holmes organized the club. they have a lot of correspondence about philosophy. holmes is very interested in philosophy and, in fact, that is one of the concerns he has about whether he'll ever catch on at law school because it may not be as interesting as philosophical issues are. but once holmes goes to law school and finally gets immersed in things, he began to separate himself from the jameses and, indeed, from his college friends -- generally and he and william james do not have much contact after that. and, when holmes writes james that letter, it is not a avorable review. it's an expression of holmes's

skepticism about whether the pragmatism does anything as a philosophy. can make nk one olmes into brandeis. brandeis was all about experimentation at the state level. particularly if it suited his agenda. you could probably say in some respect brandeis might have embraced pragmatism. but there's not a single line that i have found in holmes's papers and writing that identifies them as a specific pragmatic. i do not think it is consistent with his temperament. i do not think he is a mr. fix-it guy. i do not think he is a facilitator. he is largely aloof. i think he's largely detached, independent. he certainly wasn't much of a

player, as that term is used, on the supreme court. he was very affectionately isposed towards his fellow justice but there's very little sense that he was acting as justice brennan or someone enjoying the politics of the institution and trying to persuade people to do, take positions that he would endorse. holmes goes his own way. i realize that i'm perhaps in a minority among the holmes scholars but i resist the pragmatic label. >> i want to go back to the civil war. there has been a recent book called "harper's civil war," about the 209 massachusetts regiment by an historian named richard f. miller. what he showed was the 20th regiment was divided along ideological lines and along

class lines. so you have most of the officers being these sort of harvard gentlemen. you had german troops and then you had these nantucket wailers and some irish. there was another division beside class between the abolitionists, which holmes was at the beginning but not by the end and non-abolitionists led by henry abbott. i was just wondering if you thought, did that change holmes' ideas bout class and difference? because here's someone who really befriended a lot of boston elite wouldn't befriend. he was accepting of people of all different religions and nationalities. for wanted to know if you thought it had an influence on his acceptance of a lot of different types of people? >> i think his experience in

that regiment certainly democratized his attitudes, social attitudes in many ways. i think he came to admire courage. all of these different groups, the whaling people from nantucket, german-americans from boston, the irish. they demonstrated courage because this was a tough regiment. t the same time, i think the harvard caste of the officers, caste to some degree -- not all of them but many of them came from the upper or upper middle classes, they forged a relationship of respect and deference. the offices respected their man nd the man respected the officers. partly because the officers demonstrated their courage and

their skill as leadership. that forced the regiment into such an outstanding regiment. even though one would not originally see this as a promising mix, but it turned out to work very well. and i think that probably had something to do with holmes's sense of professionalism as being one of the highest values. >> there was no question that hen holmes enlists he thinks this is a class contribution. that he thinks that it's kind of a noblesse. oblige on the part of him and his colleagues at harvard to go out and fight for this particular cause. that is why the term chivalry comes up. this is the 19th century version of knights of the round table in olmes's consciousness.

i agree that the experience in the regiment -- it sticks in my craw a little bit to use the term democratizing in connection with holmes. t is hard to think of him as a democrat. he is after all, the author of a letter in which he says he loathes the thick fingered clowns who are the people. but, as i said earlier, he recognizes there are people from this regiment from different background, from less "distinguished backgrounds" that are better soldiers. that are dealing better with the stresses of war than he is. so i think that's important. now, with respect to holmes's -- again, this is a label people associate with him -- tolerance. with respect to his tolerance,

it is often cited that he had close friendships with people who were jewish or who were chinese. i have a couple of things to say about that. first, he clearly has a ove-hate relationship with his own sort in boston. when he goes on the court of massachusetts, he writes of some opinions that are not regarded from the point of view of some of the scholar to citizens of boston as appropriate. they are little too ntellectual. there is a quote from a senator who opposes holmes's nomination. the strategy is to bypass him, who was the senior senator from

massachusetts when henne abbott and theodore roosevelt decided to appoint holmes to the court. date is go ahead and do it. they know that at this point the senator cannot oppose holmes. he is the supreme judge of the court of massachusetts. how is the senior senator from massachusetts going to say no? but hore writes a letter and says, i think there are a lot of solid oak timber in the massachusetts bar. and i wonder whether carving a judge out of ornamental ivory would be better. so there's a sense -- and then -- 's the famous colonely the oquy between addison,

hilanthropist, after the soldiers' fate holmes runs into addison and addison says, i read your speech and i do not like it. it's bad morals and bad politics. there was a sense captured in a letter holmes writes that he believes solid citizens of boston thinks he is just not reliable. that he is too intellectual. that he is too ornamental. he resents this. and he doesn't -- with the exception of john chipman gray, he doesn't have intimate friends from this group. his intimate friends after he goes on the supreme judicial court of massachusetts fall into two categories. one group is women where he just

enjoys and maybe there's been some flirtations earlier in their lives but now they are just friends. he has long correspondences with women. gray's wife and several others. the others are people that he has intellectual engagement with and intellectual affinity with. and holmes doesn't really care who you are. if you write him and you show evidence of that you paid attention to issues that he is interested in, and whether you are john h. woo or louis einstein or whether you are flex frankfurter or howard lasky or frederick pollak, from a very different background, holmes is happy to engage with you. he is happy to talk about anything that interests him.

but, this is not -- this is a different kind of intimacy. it is very structured. it is the intimacy of the correspondence relationship. there is this story about lasky, many years younger than holmes. lasky and frankfurter are age contemporaries. they're 40 years younger than holmes. olmes was taken to lasky and laksy send him books and they exchange letters. about five years, six years into the correspondence, lasky proposes that they call each other by their first names. they have been writing as my dear holmes, my dear lasky. he sends him a letter and calls them harold. holmes writes back, my dear lasky. that is all i will say.

>> we are remiss we didn't talk about holmes and fort stevens in the civil war. was holmes at the fort with president lincoln when early's troops were approaching washington, d.c.? stories about him calling lincoln a damn fool. i want to get your thoughts on that. >> here's what we know for sure -- president lincoln was at fort stevens on july 11. he was peering over the parapet while the bullets were flying. some soldier told him to get down. he may have said it, get down, you fool. he may have said get down, you damn foot. but we know that somebody did told john hay

about it that evening that some soldier had roughly told them to get down. hay recorded in his diary. we don't know whether holmes was there on the 11th. we know he was there on the next day and lincoln was there. on this occasion, general wright told lincoln to get down. i would like to believe that it was holmes on the 11th who told lincoln to get down, but we don't know that for sure. and i don't know, ted, what you ink about this i suspect probably it was somebody else but i wish it was holmes. >> i have reason to doubt that it was holmes for two reasons. holmes talked to his close friends about particular experiences that he had in the civil war. he talked to his law clerks about them.

his law clerks remembered of several conversations. when he would remember the days of wounds, he would sometimes make other allusions to things and he did write a letter that demonstrates, as jim has said, that he was at fort stevens when lincoln was there. he actually mentions the fact hat lincoln was there. he says nothing about any incident involving people -- somebody telling lincoln to get down, you fool. nd that is a little curious. holmes was very far from being someone who wanted to embellish his participation in things. so, i think if he had on that occasion said get down, you fool, to lincoln, he would've

simply said they did that to someone at some point. he would not have advertised it prominently but he would've mentioned it to an intimate at some point in his life and he never did. the other thing is the source of the story was harold lasky. lasky was a notorious embellisher. so, there is no other account or source for this story. so i am inclined to put this one in the same category as the story that when daniel webster made is argument in the dartmouth college case, there are tears in john marshall's eyes. it is a good story and somebody tells it at some point in the history of writing up these incidents and it is too good and

-- good for people not to repeat. >> before we go, i wanted to talk about holmes's views about lincoln. because it seems like not only was holmes ambivalent about the war after his experience, but he was also ambivalent about lincoln. when people asked him about lincoln later on, he didn't really put lincoln in the great man category. i am curious to why you think that. >> i do not know the answer to that question. i have been curious as well. i find ate little bit puzzling. i think he did vote for lincoln in 1864, there is no doubt about that. he did not in 1860 because he couldn't yet vote in 1860. but you're quite right in that he never really expressed the kind

of reverence for lincoln or admiration and profound respect for lincoln's leadership and what lincoln stood for that one might have thought, that, i think his father, oliver wendell holmes sr. did. and it may have had something to do with the skepticism in which he emerged from the war about so much of everything. but it still does puzzle me. i don't really have a good answer to that question. >> he comes out of the war with a very strong sense of what a mess the campaigns were. really the experience of the army of the potomac would've confirmed that. for long periods in holmes's service, he's just wading through swamps trying to get from the virginia northern neck area to richmond in two different abortive efforts to

invade richmond. he sees people randomly shot. he gets randomly shot. he sees people run to their deaths because someone gives them a wrong order. he never has any sense of what the general plan of the war is so he may have associated lincoln in with the strategists of the war and thought that it was pretty much of a mess and partly blamed lincoln for that. he is not an abolitionist after the war. he has a much more ambivalent attitude towards the confederates and the returning confederates. no particular reason to lionize lincoln. and lionization wasn't holmes's style. he wrote a lot of affectionate tributes to people on their deaths or remembering them and said some nice things about

them, but praise was not his strong suit. so i can imagine his having an attitude toward linking of -- lincoln of increasing detachment over the years. >> one last thing of dr. host -- holmes came up. one thing we haven't established is holmes himself was the son of a very famous father at the time. his father capitalized by writing a very famous story. the hunt after the captain and i know you can make too much of this struggle to escape his father's shadow, but do you think that this created at least an estrangement between holmes and his father or at least put a distance between them, that his father, who was an ardent abolitionist before

and after the war and holmes was not? that this caused them strain in the relationship? >> could be. jim referred to holmes' love-hate relationship between his colleagues in college. i think love and hate might be too strong to describe his relationship with his father but i think he probably did have this kind of ambivalent relationship with his father. on the one hand, it was a close relationship, but on the other hand, clearly, an ambitious young man will try to escape from the shadow of a very prominent father, especially since he is moving into a different kind of profession. >> i know you've written a lot about it but i just wanted to get your take on this because you cannot really talk about him during the war without talking about his relationship with his father. > first of all, the generation of holmes' parents -- his father was not an abolitionist at the

time the war broke out so in some ways holmes's group is making a statement by enlisting. but i think holmes resented the "my captain" article. if you can imagine the circumstances -- he is in his second wound, he is returning to -- from the battle. his father then comes down to meet him and then writes an article in which he writes about a trip with his son. so just don't forget, even though he's a returning civil war veteran that he's my son. i think holmes did not appreciate that. holmes jr. did not appreciate that. going into law was a way of distancing himself from his father. >> on that note i promised i'd end at 7:00. i thank you all for coming.

this has been a remarkable panel with two remarkable people. please, give them a round of pplause. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org-- to watch more of our civil war programming any time, visit our website. you're watching american history tv all weekend, every weekend on c-span 3. -- hn quincy adams was of the second adams to be elected to the white house. -- to be second elected to the white house. he was only one of two anti-slavery presidents to be elected to the white house. feared by the his that worried that

vision of a unified country in which the federal government and the states were partners in a relationship that enabled the federal government to play a leading role in binding the country together through infrastructure projects, through supporting manufacture and so on, that he was deeply suspected by the southern states who thought, indeed, that he wanted too much power for the federal government. >> on the life of our sixth president, john quincy adams, sunday night at 8:00 eastern and pacific on c-span's q&a. >> next, a look at timothy webster. a spy during the civil war. he was known as the top spy

until he was discovered. the museum of the confederacy hosted this event. it's about 45 >> we would like to welcome everybody to our book talk. i am kelly hancock, the manager of programs here at the museum of the confederacy. we do a number of different talks throughout the year. we have a brown bag lunch series that takes place on the third friday of the month. keep those options in mind. i am here to introduce to you corey recko. his first book, "murder on the white sands," was published in 2007 and won an award for the best book on wild west history. while working on the book, he began to research pinkerton's national detective agency.